Unseen Flora is a series that reimagines the world of botanical illustrations through the lens of AI. It was first created as a generative digital collection on the occasion of our collaboration with Bright Moments on their Artist in Residence programme.

Generative collections focus on the randomness of the pieces: each collection features a large amount of non-fungible tokens, each of them possessing randomised combinations of design assets that define its traits and metadata attributes. Unlike 1/1 NFTs individually created and collected, generative collections comprehend unique works with consistent yet varied features and characteristics referencing one another.

For the occasion,  we designed a collection that could adhere to the specific requirements of the digital medium. It was crucial that the collection had consistent features across all pieces and that each feature had a different rarity percentage to enhance desirability. This approach taps into the gamification aspect of online collecting experiences, where collectors are pushed to collect multiple pieces in the hope of obtaining rarest features and designs.

To ensure coherence and add depth to the collection, we added an additional layer of meaning by crafting a narrative featuring four fictional botanists Charlotte Bancroft, Beatrice Hastings, Edmund Thorne and Theodore Winslow, each of them with a precise backstory and an area of study. These characters provided a narrative framework for the digital collection: moreover, additional assets, such as background colour or presence of animals, added complexity to the final pieces.

In order to enhance the gamified experience at the minting event at Bright Moments Gallery in London, we also created through ChatGPT and other AI models a complete background for the botanists, together with portraits and other fictional elements from their lives, to blur their existence at the border between reality and fiction. This blend of reality and fiction underscores the series' central theme, challenging the boundaries of what is considered logical and credible. The series showcases the potential of AI models, while also inviting to question the nature of reality and plausibility.

At the end of the minting experience, the collection was set at 150 pieces: it can be browsed on ArtBlocks at this link.